Regaining trust in my ability to change
I watched my youth slip away from me in the past decade. The life I want is shapeless, a convenient vagueness I used as a reason to stay put. Now I am not the person who I want to be and I lost belief in my ability to change.1
Can you really be anyone but yourself? Can people really change at a fundamental level? Most of the changes I've seen are one-off miracles. There's the uncle who stopped smoking out of nowhere, or the friend who suddenly started taking school seriously. But we all know someone who evolved many times throughout their life. They get what they want out of life. I call them "people of action".
People of action can act on their desires. When they want something, they take actions toward achieving it. The blueprint has never changed: Do the work needed to move heavenward. Keep doing it when it gets boring. Keep doing it when you lose faith. Keep doing it when you forget why you're doing it. You'll find that somewhere along the way, you have become someone new.
Resist everything that prevents you from taking action. You are what you do.2
I wonder why I always frame it as "losing belief in my ability to change", but never "losing my ability to change". Maybe because a part of me believes that I can change, but simply do not want to.↩
As I write this I realize that at some point I conveniently switched from criticizing myself to preaching to others. The deception never ends.↩